The Normalcy of Horror

There has been another shooting today.  Yesterday it was rape that made the headline.  The day before...perhaps a murder?  The top news stories have begun to merge together into one haze of forgetfulness.  I make attempts, rather resolutions, to follow the news regularly.  I try to let the authoritative voice of the newscaster draw my waning attention.  But I have heard this story before.  I have seen these familiar faces of pain and heartache, and I can no longer watch.  I switch off the television to avoid darkness; a darkness I no longer can distinguish.  Does it stem from sympathy felt for those on TV or for the realization that their stories bore me?

I feel this divide with every dramatic event of Forensics I have seen.  I am beaten with the knowledge that to avoid sorrow over how horrid the world is I must remind myself bad things happen, it is a part of life, and that this repetition of hardship does little more than exhaust me.  Subjects ranging from rape, to cancer, to AIDS, to death are common on the Forensics circuit.  So commonplace in fact that it is a joke surrounding all dramatic events.  "Have you seen the DI about AIDS?"  "Which one?"  Ha. Ha. I have laughed.  We all have.  And we all must.  If we always took these events with their heavy topics seriously we would go mad.  We subject ourselves to a concentrated showing of the highest depravity of mankind on a weekly basis--willingly.  Yet though we must tread lightly, it is sad how desensitized we are to these accounts of abomination.  We have classified them as a normalcy when we deal with them in Forensics. 

But how long can this wall that separates Forensics from Life last before it shatters and these horrors become a norm in our daily lives?  

     We trudge on day by day, cold to the terrors encasing us.  Blind, numb, and dead to the nightmares we do not share.  Our fear so vast, their pain so great, we no longer choke or struggle against the smothering.  We mindlessly march forward--left foot...right foot...left...right...listening to the channel that is our chosen ignorance.